Benedetto Croce: The Essence of Aesthetic

That the author should endeavor such a task as to define art in one word is remarkable enough.  That he very nearly succeeds is nothing short of formative.

Croce's proposal that art can be defined simply as "intuition" is the sort of seductive aphorism that I am surprised doesn't get tossed around more than the similarly catchy and vague "The act of you looking is art".  It bears up to casual conversation, and is suitable to be dropped as a one-liner over a glass of Malbec, but not a glass of absinthe.  Intuition is a word, and as such is at mercy to all the linguistic traps that Wittgenstein proposed, the more so insofar as Croce proposed it in his native Italian.  It is suffused with layers of meaning and interpretation, many of which are unique to the individual speaker of listener, and the idea of art as intuition requires as much translation, explication, and defense as one would expect.  What is remarkable about Croce is not, therefore, that he has chosen a word that is more or less acceptable to represent something that seemingly defies representation.  Rather, it is that the idea behind his choice is so incisive and universal that it untangles not only the conundrum at hand, but does so in a way that reveals underlying truths much deeper than he may have intended to probe.  The Gordian knot he cuts is revealed to have been holding up the curtain of perception that obscures reality, and which so many mistake for reality itself.

Hans Gombrich's excellent treatment of The Story of Art is one that I, rightly or not, recall as framing art as the constant swing of a pendulum between what is seen and what is known, between perception and thought, idea and reality.  Croce denies the existence of this pendulum, and in fact begins his argument with a denial of anything historical, moral, technical, or scientific in the nature of art.  Those who phrase art in terms of its purpose, its rightful execution, or its place in society are mistaking the reflection of the moon for the moon itself, the frame for the picture.  Art is not a dialectic between two things, Croce determines, not the swinging of a pendulum, but the thesis of the two, the moment when the pendulum suddenly comes to rest. 

Although the word intuition itself if not helpful in the task that Croce has set for it, his exponence of it most certainly is.  There are those that insist art is an act of beauty, a product--be it poem, song, or image--that exists in and of itself.  Accordingly, any question of meaning or purpose has no place in the conversation.  On the other hand are those that say the mere beauty of an object is not enough to qualify it as art.  These latter are constantly asking what it "means" (a nauseating question, to be sure) and finding no deeper purpose behind a work, consign it to the merely pleasing, rather than artistic.  Croce reveals this argument to be a foolish one, but, like so many foolish questions, one that inadvertently reveals the truth behind it.  Art is neither product nor process, image nor idea, but rather the perfect union of the two in one moment.  A moment of true art is not a song, poem, or image that perfectly expresses a moment of the soul; nor is it a philosophical truth somehow given form.  It is both of these things and neither: an unreal reality.  For Croce, art is the moment when it is not necessary to "promote mysterious nuptials between sign and image", but when the image itself is the sign (52).  The signifier of art cannot be divorced from its signified, any more than a word can be divorced from its meaning.  Both exist simultaneously in the sign, and to say that one does not gain supremacy over the other is to miss the point.  Rather, both cease to exist, and language, or art, is born. Anything that can be called Art is the marriage of the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen, the perceived and the conceived, a lyrical intuition of a state of the soul.

No doubt my interpretation of Croce's meaning is heavily colored by my own thinking.  His language is often obscure, and he frequently takes for granted that of which I have no knowledge.  Combined with the obvious dangers of translation (although Italian is less opaque to English than some languages), and it may well be that Croce would give me a good slap for misunderstanding him so thoroughly.  Nonetheless, dead as he is, I shall add this volume to the growing, internal works cited page that appendices my continuing search for the nacheinander and the nebeneinander, the unreal reality of life.